Contents

In the area of window managers Linux users are completely and totally spoiled rotten. We constantly debate the merits of one desktop environment/window manager over another. We argue over what programs are better than others, what versions of those programs we like over another and getting in world class pissing contests all the while crying about what we wish they would do better or differently. I wish Windows users had this problem, but they don’t. Why? Because they have no choice.

[...]

We have gotten fat on the bounty of choices and drunk with the power of functionality they provide us. Go use a generic NT, 2000 or XP setup for a week and then try and tell me that KDE, GNOME, Xfce, Enlightenment etc. are really that much better or worse than each other. Because compared to the Microsoft window manager in any version of Windows, any Linux window manager blows it away.

Fujitsu, today, announced that it has completed joint development of a new supercomputing system in association with the Japan Atomic Energy Agency [JAEA]. The new machine, after going operational today, is now the fastest system in Japan.

Google

Google’s Chrome OS Netbook will feature a host of built-in security technologies designed to protect users from malware and other threats, a Google engineer said at the RSA Conference Thursday.

Will Drewry, a Google software security engineer, said the fact that the company’s Chrome OS is an open source project allows for constant feedback from developers regarding security design. This, he said, should reassure those acquiring a Google Netbook about the product’s security.

Google plans to release a consumer version later this year and a business version featuring more management muscle in 2011, Drewry said.

Kernel Space

Last week brought the arrival of a new Linux kernel, version 2.6.33. With it, came quite a few changes likely to interest device developers. So, here is a breakdown of the most significant mobile/embedded updates to come in the latest kernel.

Of a lot of interest to us (and likely you too) are all of the GPU DRM updates in the Linux 2.6.34 kernel that includes GPU hybrid switching, initial ATI Radeon HD 5000 series KMS support (a.k.a. “Evergreen”), controversial Nouveau changes, ATI Radeon KMS power management support, Intel Sandy Bridge support, and much more.

Outside of the graphics fun in this kernel to be officially released next quarter is a new filesystem (Logfs), a hardware driver for Apple’s Magic Mouse, virtualization improvements, and other updates particularly to the Linux drivers and architectures.

As mentioned in a previous article a great place to start learning about new features of the latest kernels is Kernel Newbie site. Kernel newbies has a nice review of the latest kernel, 2.6.33. There are a few things around storage that I want to point out.

The biggest thing is that the anticipatory IO scheduler. In a article I did a quick glance at the IO schedulers in the kernel. One of them is called the Anticipartory Scheduler that anticipates subsequent block requests and caches them for use. Putting on your storage expert hat one can see that the anticipatory scheduler works really well for certain workloads. For example it has been observed that the Apache web server may achieve up to 71% more throughput using the anticipatory IO scheduler. On the other hand, it has been observed that the anticipatory scheduler has caused up to a 15% slowdown on a database run.

My primary role for the Linux kernel is to be SCSI subsystem maintainer, which means I have to run a Git tree for Linux and manage a mailing-list-based community (SCSI is also a fairly enterprise-oriented community, so if there’s tension between desktop needs and enterprise needs, it tends to be the flash point). I’m also one of the maintainers of PA-RISC (HP’s old RISC system) in the kernel, and I’ve written and maintained a few SCSI drivers.

There’s a few months left until it’s summertime in the northern hemisphere, but Google is already preparing for their annual Summer of Code (SoC) project as are their projects involved. X.Org will once again be part of the Summer of Code program where Google pays various student developers to work on different free software projects. While nothing is yet officially determined for the X.Org SoC work, there are some ideas expressed by the X.Org developers for any interested students.

Graphics Stack

At the start of the month we talked about GPU switching coming to Linux in a crude form that allowed notebooks with dual GPUs (one being a low-power, low-performance integrated chip and the other being the more performance-oriented GPU that’s power hungry) to be switched from without the need for a reboot in Linux. This initial work was just a collection of hacks by David Airlie and it required VT switching after killing the X Server, etc. It also didn’t power down the unused GPU. However, as the days passed, this code did more and delayed GPU switching came too.

Beyond working on a R600/700 winsys as well as a command submission checker for these ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series graphics processors, Jerome Glisse of Red Hat has also been busy at work on a shader compiler for the R600/700 ASICs with the still-in-early-development Gallium3D driver. Over the weekend Jerome hit one of his first milestones with this code.

Most Linux distributions this year will be switching over to the community-created Nouveau graphics driver stack now that there’s mainline DRM support in the Linux 2.6.33 kernel and later releases that provides kernel mode-setting support and more. However, for those that have not yet made move to the Nouveau driver (or are running a *BSD or OpenSolaris where there is not yet the ported DRM) and are sticking it out with NVIDIA’s rudimentary, feature-limited open-source driver, there is a new update out today. NVIDIA’s Aaron Plattner has just declared the xf86-video-nv 2.1.17 driver release.

Applications

In developed countries, healthcare workers represent a significant proportion of the working population. For example, in the United Kingdom, more than 1 million people work for the National Health Service, a publicly funded healthcare system. Medical software therefore has a huge market to tap. Whatever stage of a country’s economic development, health care is one of the most important elements in society.

Recently we aquired a Sony Cybershot n50 I hooked this camera up to my Linux system and it picked it right up as Linux does with many Digital Camera’s and the world was good. Then one evening I get home from a long night at work and my newly converted from Windows wife is asking for her Window’s install back. New Linux users can be so difficult to please. Anyways upon investigation I found out that she just wanted to run the Sony Picture Motion Browser software that came with the Camera. So I fired up wine-doors and put the disk in and gave it a try inside Linux.

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch claims that the company’s ubiquitous Flash plug-in doesn’t ship with any known crash bugs. One can only assume that he has never used the software. As Adobe representatives exhibit an increasingly dismissive attitude about Flash’s technical deficiencies, the browser vendors have stepped up to address the problems and are finding ways to insulate their users from Flash’s poor security and lack of stability.

MPlayer is not your run-of-the mill video player. It’s a multi-platform codec-chewing monster truck of a video player for the connoisseur of video players. It has options galore and has the flexibility to play almost anything under the sun.

Typically, I wouldn’t recommend MPlayer for new Linux users any more than I’d recommend Vim for folks who just want to edit a few lines of text. It’s extremely capable and can be tamed with one of the many GUIs available (MPlayer, that is), but it’s got quite a bit of complexity and can be less than user-friendly at times. But for those who are willing to roll up their sleeves and dig in, MPlayer makes a fine video player.

Games

Back in December we shared that a dinosaur game is coming to Linux known as Primal Carnage and it’s using the Unigine engine. The Unigine engine is the most advanced game engine that we have seen available for Linux that offers incredible OpenGL graphics now with their Unigine Sanctuary and Tropics tests and also coming soon with Heaven and its OpenGL 3.2 renderer. The Unigine engine developers are also Linux friendly.

Back in December we shared that a dinosaur game is coming to Linux known as Primal Carnage and it’s using the Unigine engine. The Unigine engine is the most advanced game engine that we have seen available for Linux that offers incredible OpenGL graphics now with their Unigine Sanctuary and Tropics tests and also coming soon with Heaven and its OpenGL 3.2 renderer. The Unigine engine developers are also Linux friendly.

Valve Corp has not yet publicly commented on any plans for Linux support, but with the step over to Mac OS X with OpenGL is a huge move and going back to 2007 Valve has been looking for software engineers to port its titles to Linux.

Could 2010 be the year for Linux gaming?

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

With the release of KDE Software Compilation 4.4, many may feel tempted to give KDE Plasma Desktop (previously known as just “KDE”, see Repositioning the KDE Brand) a try. Plasma Desktop introduced in KDE SC 4 behaves quite differently from other popular desktop workspaces, and without doubt many new users will feel slightly lost and confused the first time.

I’ve gathered some tips for new users to get a more familiar desktop, based on frequently asked questions I’ve seen in various places. This is in no way a “10 things you should do” list – it’s up to you to decide which way you like better.

PCLinuxOS-2010.beta1 features 2.6.32.8 kernel utilizing the BFS scheduler for maximum desktop performance on i686 and up computers. This kernel supports up to 4 gigs of memory. A PAE kernel is available from the Synaptic Package Manager providing up to 64 gig of memory suppport. In addition ext4 support is also available.

Ubuntu

For every UDS, Canonical sponsors a number of community members to attend the event. We are looking for those who want to bring some real insight and expertise in their area of Ubuntu, be it development or community governance. If you feel you could offer this but can’t afford to cover your expenses of attending, you should apply for sponsorship.

As many of you will be aware, this week Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Week took part, and the week has been wonderful so far. There has been so much excitement and interest, and I have been tickled pink at just how many people have been telling me that the week has re-invigorated their interest or given them a new passion for writing fun and useful apps. Ubuntu is an awesome platform for making these apps, and it has been a real pleasure to see people getting so fired up about using it.

Before the week kicked off, I offered a fun little challenge called The Grand App Writing Challenge. With a week of rocking content ahead designed to help build a fun and thriving community who like to write apps that scratch their itches, I put forward the challenge for you good people to write some apps and see how far you get this week, and I will blog your progress at the end of the week. Well, while we still have a few sessions yet to go, it is Friday and I was keen to show off some progress!

As part of International Women’s Day, the Ubuntu Women team have been running a competition to gather a collection of stories that share how women discovered Ubuntu and their experiences of joining our community. I thought this was a wonderful initiative: it really speaks to strong experiences of how Ubuntu can enable women to join a collaborative community, and how technology can be a true enabler.

From its Debian roots to its commercially available support to its overwhelming popularity, Ubuntu is the ultimate Linux distribution. For me, Ubuntu became a significant force within the Linux community with its 2006 releases: 6.04 and 6.10. From April 2006, I’ve installed and used every new version and anticipate each new one the way a child anticipates toys on Christmas morning. But, have you ever wondered why is Ubuntu the ultimate Linux distribution? Why is it so popular? Why did Canonical choose Debian as its distribution template? And, why did Mark Shuttleworth believe in Linux so much that he chose to create Canonical to support it?

When one types an address into the Firefox address bar, the remembered URLs come up – and while the names of the sites are in reverse and readable, the actual URLs are a bright shade of blue. Bright blue type on a dark background. Readability at its best.

Amber Graner: Today we talk to Emma Jane Hogbin, Technical Author, HiCKTech creator, Drupal Guru, Ubuntu Member and the list goes on. Before I want to say thank you for taking the time to tell us about your journey into the Ubuntu Project. Emma can you tell us a little about when and how you got involved in FOSS? Also, How and when did you get involved with the Ubuntu Project?

Emma Jane Hogbin: When I first graduated from university I chatted with various companies to find out what kind of work I wanted to do. (My degree is in Environmental Science, but I took a job as a project manager for a Web design company that specialized in web sites for environmental groups.) One of the companies that I met with had an entire shelf of Adobe software boxes. I made a comment about warez sites, and the owner of the company responded by saying that carpenters don’t steal their hammers. My father is a wood worker, so this hit home in exactly the right way for me. From that point on I started looking into free and open source tools.

Some time ago I bought a Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 laptop. At the time it was the fastest thing I could buy. It was also the heaviest! With a 17″ 1920×1200 screen and all the toys, it’s a bit of a dead weight. It was always intended to be a desktop replacement, so it mostly sat on my desk all of its life so the weight wasn’t an issue. Having nice big screen was lovely for desktop use and playing the odd game.

[...]

30 minutes later the card was cool enough for me to put it back in the machine. I carefully put it all back together and booted it up. It worked! The video corruption had gone. Well, almost. I was left with one vertical purple line about 3 pixels in from the left, which I can totally live with. In the drive was an old Crunchbang CD which booted up just fine.

Dave (@Daviey) is a Ubuntu community leader, consultant specialising in business IT, server and telephony systems.

The next version of Ubuntu – codename Lucid Lynx – will be the 10.04 release, and is scheduled to be released and declared stable in April. As a long-term support version, coupled with increasing popularity, this is undoubtedly the most important Ubuntu release to date.

Digi International says it is shipping a development kit targeting development of wireless multimedia applications using Freescale’s i.MX515 SoC (system on chip). The ConnectCore Wi-i.MX51 Digi JumpStart Kit includes an ARM Cortex-A8-based module, a baseboard, a seven-inch touchscreen, and a BSP (board support package), the company says.

Fujitsu announced an ARM9-based SoC (system on chip) including the company’s “Coral PA” 2D/3D graphics controller. The MB86R03 “Jade L” is clocked at 320MHz, supports dual displays with resolutions up to 1024 x 768 pixels, and costs less than existing Jade SoCs, the company says.

Ok, back to the imagining: Your mobile computer is great, but sadly the keyboard and screen aren’t that great for long form typing. Sure, you can tweet your tweets, book your face, and SMS your SMSers — but even a moderate length email starts to get annoying. If only there were a way to get your pocket sized computer onto a docking station. A docking station with a battery. And a screen. And a real keyboard. Just like the Palm Foleo almost was!

I’m not suggesting the Foleo should exist in its original form. I’m suggesting Palm (or Nokia?) design a sheath for their mobile computers that could replace a netbook. Really, do you ever have a netbook somewhere you don’t have your cellphone? Of course not. Just think about the advantages a Foleo-like device could offer the mobile geek:

* A huge battery to charge the phone while “docked.”
* A big screen. Even if a similar resolution, bigger pixels.
* A keyboard as opposed to a thumbboard.

Phones

In an announcement published last week, Nokia’s Valtteri Halla revealed that Intel and Nokia are planning to launch the public MeeGo source code repository by the end of the month.

The MeeGo project began to take shape last month when Intel and Nokia announced plans to merge their respective Linux-based mobile computing platforms into a single open source software project. The unified software platform, which consists of technology from Maemo and Moblin, will be designed for use on a wide range of device form factors and will support both ARM and x86 architectures.

1Crosstech demonstrated a dual-display Android MID and e-reader device at last week’s CeBit show, says ARMDevices.net. The MIDHybrid offers a 6-inch E Ink monochrome display on one side and a 3.2-inch HVGA display on the other, and provides 3G telephony, WiFi, Bluetooth, and a VGA webcam, according to the story.

At this year’s CeBIT IT trade fair in Hannover, ARCHOS, the French multimedia tablet manufacturer, has announced two new touch-screen tablets that run Google’s open source Android operating system. According to ARCHOS, the ARCHOS 7 and ARCHOS 8 Home Tablets are aimed at home users, bridging the gap between smartphones and desktop PCs and providing always-on access to the internet and multimedia content.

We’re big fans of most Android apps that can help us get the skinny on nearby restaurants and bars, Yelp included. We weren’t overly impressed with Yelp’s initial attempt for Android, however, but the last two updates have brought it closer in line with Yelp’s other mobile apps.

MIPS Technologies announced the availability of new debug and development tools for its Android on MIPS development platform. MIPS is now offering the open source QEMU emulator, as well as Viosoft’s Arriba development tools for QEMU, and has added a compiler and development GUI to its Android Native Development Kit (NDK).

Embedded processor manufacturer MIPS Technologies has released free tools for developing and testing Android applications. These take the form of a distribution of open source processor emulator QEMU aimed at speeding up Android application design on MIPS processor architecture, and the Arriba Java development tool for QEMU, which has been produced as a result of a partnership with Viosoft, the company behind Arriba.

China’s second largest mobile phone company will be selling Google Android phones after all, according to a report from Reuters.

China Unicom’s chairman Chang Xiaobing told Reuters Wednesday, on the sidelines of a conference in Beijing, that the carrier “recognizes that Android is a mainstream system.” And he told the news service that the company “will definitely use Google’s Android in our mobile handsets.”

Sub-notebooks

I installed easy peasy 1.6 to my 16 gig thumbdrive, on my HP mini. The HP Mini has a 16 gig SSD as its maid drive, and I have Mandriva 2010 installed there. The Mandriva works flawlessly, and so far, everything works. The easy peasy install was un-eventful, but it did not ask me where to install the boot loader. I have installed Moblin, and Chromeos to this same thumb drive and it did not do anything to my Mandriva install. After installation, I started running it through some tests.

One of the major innovations of OLPC consists in the idea that a computer given to a single child (also called 1:1 computing) is the best way to enhance the pupil’s ability to learn effectively. It’s called ONE-laptop-per-child after all.

CouchDB is an open source project run by the Apache Software Foundation but with some commercial backing from startup Cloudant, which provides cloud services for CouchDB. With the additional cloud deployment options, Cloudant is aiming to help accelerate CouchDB adoption and make the database even more scalable.

Jeremy Allison of the Samba fame wrote an interesting blog post about Sun’s approach to open source participatory development, followed by Bradley Kuhn’s bad opinion of Oracle’s attitude towards open source.

Developer Joshua Wright intends to release KillerBee, an open source collectionPDF of Linux tools intended for testing the security of ZigBee networks. According to Wright, many ZigBee implementations are a mess – he hopes that his tool, which is coded in Python, will ultimately lead to more secure products.

[...]

ZigBee (IEEE 802.15.4) is far more popular than Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or DECT for these kind of scenarios, as it is simpler to implement – the complete stack requires only 120 KB of space – and because the wireless technology uses significantly less energy. Wright, however, concludes that “When both simplicity and low cost are goals, security suffers.”

Events

When the Open Source Business Conference starts March 17 in San Francisco, The VAR Guy will be watching and listening closely for signs of corporate open source momentum from upstarts like Canonical and giants like Microsoft, Oracle and even SAP. Yes, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. Here are five trends to anticipate at the OSBC conference.

From March 2-6 CeBIT Open Source 2010 called open source projects, enterprises, and organizations to Hannover, Germany. Here’s our photo gallery from the talks in the Open Source forum, the project lounge, and the Linux New Media awards.

Browsers

Cross-browser testing for both security and functionality issues is a crucial step for any serious Web application. There are several automated tools out there for assisting the task, including some from open source projects like Selenium. However, several problems remain in cross-platform testing procedures, even with proven tools.

Databases

MySQL, the open source database product that puts the “M” in LAMP, was created by MySQL AB, a company founded in 1995 in Sweden. In 2008, MySQL AB announced that it had agreed to be acquired by Sun Microsystems for approximately $1 billion.

Designing a new database is simple using the diagram creation feature, as shown in Figure 3. Just create the tables and columns, and then use the palette to formalize the table relations. This particular diagram indicates two one-to-many relationships formalized between the account table and the state and country tables.

FSF/FSFE/GNU

FSFE welcomes the arrival of greater competition in the web browser market. From today, Microsoft has to offer Windows users in Europe the possibility to choose among different browsers. This step puts into practice the company’s settlement with the European Commission from December 2009. The Free Software Foundation Europe was an active participant in the Commission’s investigation.

Government

Remember the governmental regulations that SourceForge ran afoul of, requiring us to keep users from certain countries from downloading certain software? Today the US government made a move toward software freedom when it issued amendments to its regulations to allow individuals in some of the affected countries more privileges.

This post follows swiftly on from last week’s blog in which I touted BECTA’s demise. Things in edu-world after this weekend are looking much worse if you believe Ed Balls the Labour Secretary of State for Education and Michael Gove the Shadow Secretary.

Mr Balls is looking for £300 million in school cuts, he has identified £100 million so far and £40 million will come directly out of BECTA (but not abolished, note). Mr Gove has announced a root and branch review of both the National Curriculum and the Examination Boards. Simply put he favours a return to a simpler more ‘traditional’ curriculum…circa 1980′s by the look of it (pre-Microsoft?).

[...]

I love my Sony E-reader, I covet the latest Kindle but I hate buying books on-line.

Three things really annoy me.

1) The on-line buying experience is miserable. So much ‘security’ with OS specific (Microsoft wouldn’t you know?) client software to keep control of the DRM stuff that so obsesses publishers.

2) The cost. You can often get much the same book for much the same price from your local store. Duh, where are the printing and distribution costs? You can’t kid me that producing digital books is ‘hard’, it’s not.

Licensing

The 10-year-old Mozilla Public License will be updated by the end of 2010.

At the open source organization’s weekly meeting Monday, Mozilla Corp president Mitchell Baker announced that the MPL needs to be refreshed. It’s not clear if there will be any major league changes to the hybrid license. It appears that the higher ups want the language updated, the terms simplified and the license modernized.

The reason of this choise is that the project now is a real fork and I need to use all free platforms I can. I’m not a Bazaar lover and so Sourceforge is used only as git repository, launchpad is used for bug tracking, features requests and, soon, as repository.

You can download it and run it on any modern Linux installation. It seems to run on Ubuntu just fine, though PNG support is a little wonky. The good news is that the folks on Github are actively submitting patches.

Finance

Reporting from Washington – The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is building a large-scale grass-roots political operation that has begun to rival those of the major political parties, funded by record-setting amounts of money raised from corporations and wealthy individuals.

The chamber has signed up some 6 million individuals who are not chamber members and has begun asking them to help with lobbying and, soon, with get-out-the-vote efforts in upcoming congressional campaigns.

For me, as for you, this is the second collapse. You had left USSR before it happened, while I was there to observe it as a child. I saw what happened when people were finally told that they were being had for seventy-odd years, and were offered a candy bar as consolation. Now, after all this, Russian society is finished. It grieves me to see the faces of Americans, who still believe something and wave their Constitution about, and to know that the same thing is about to happen to them. I think that the model which you have proposed will allow us to confront and to survive this collapse with dignity.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

As President Obama moves ahead with health care reform, interest groups on both sides of the issue are again ramping up their lobbying efforts. Robert Zirkelbach of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the insurance industry’s top lobbying group, said his industry is making “a big effort” to counteract attacks from Obama and other Democrats, who have pointed to hefty premium increases to show why health care reform is needed.

Washington interest groups have burst back into action in hopes of bolstering or defeating a new Democratic push on health-care reform legislation, sparking another wave of rallies, lobbying efforts and costly advertising campaigns.

The fresh round offers a clear signal that the industries and advocacy groups most likely to be affected view the coming weeks as the final battle in determining whether Democratic proposals become law.

In the 1950s, more than half the U.S. population smoked. Now that number is down to just 21 percent of adults. As the domestic cigarette market shrinks, tobacco companies are taking their business to the developing world, where they don’t have to deal with pesky things like advocacy groups that oppose industry activity, smoking bans, and a populace that is aware of the health hazards of smoking.

Now Philip Morris (PM) is playing hardball in lesser-developed countries to try and preserve their ability to market cigarettes however they want. On February 19, PM filed a lawsuit against Uruguay to try and force that country to withdraw a new law requiring 80 percent of each side of cigarette packs show graphic images depicting the health effects of smoking.

For weeks, the U.S. public followed the biggest offensive of the Afghanistan War against what it was told was a “city of 80,000 people” as well as the logistical hub of the Taliban in that part of Helmand. That idea was a central element in the overall impression built up in February that Marja was a major strategic objective, more important than other district centres in Helmand.

ABC News perpetuated the myth the next day, in a story that referred to the “city of Marja” and claiming that the city and its surrounding area were “more heavily populated, urban and dense than other places the Marines so far have been able to clear and hold.” The rest of the news media fell in line, giving fake descriptions of a densely populated, urban Marja, often using the terms “city” and “town” interchangeably, without fact-checking the descriptions. On February 22, the Washington Post reported that the decision to launch the big offensive against Marja was intended largely to impress U.S. public opinion with the military’s effectiveness in Afghanistan by showing that it could achieve a “large and loud victory.” The false idea that Marja was a significantly large city center was an essential part of that message.

The lunacy of the EPO with its patent maximalism will likely go unchecked (and uncorrected) if Battistelli gets his way and turns the EPO into another SIPO (Croatian in the human rights sense and Chinese in the quality sense)

Another long installment in a multi-part series about UPC at times of post-truth Battistelli-led EPO, which pays the media to repeat the lies and pretend that the UPC is inevitable so as to compel politicians to welcome it regardless of desirability and practicability

Implementing yet more of his terrible ideas and so-called 'reforms', Battistelli seems to be racing to the bottom of everything (patent quality, staff experience, labour rights, working conditions, access to justice etc.)

"Good for trolls" is a good way to sum up the Unitary Patent, which would give litigators plenty of business (defendants and plaintiffs, plus commissions on high claims of damages) if it ever became a reality

Microsoft's continued fascination with and participation in the effort to undermine Alice so as to make software patents, which the company uses to blackmail GNU/Linux vendors, widely acceptable and applicable again